


Misericordia

by Alexa C (marylex)



Series: Three Kings [1]
Category: Oz (HBO)
Genre: Character of Color, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-24
Updated: 2004-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-06 18:44:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marylex/pseuds/Alexa%20C
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Angel de la Guarda, dulce compañío.</em><br/>You're tired of living in a world where it's worse to be kissed than to be beaten.</p><p>Written for the Oz Gift of the Magi Challenge, 2004.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Misericordia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dustandroses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustandroses/gifts).



When you kiss him, you're as surprised as he is, the soft slide of lips and the slick glide of tongues taking you both unaware.

He's kneeling on the floor beside the bed, coaxing you out from under the blankets, encouraging you to sit up, but you slouch, feeling drained and battered, like you've been beaten again. He reaches out one hand toward your throat but hesitates, hovering, and so you take his fingers and press them to your neck. You're out of the infirmary and the bruises are fading, but the marks left by the twisted sheets still burn under his fingers, burn like _los infiernos_ that you're gonna face for trying to take your own life. You were looking forward to it, thought maybe they'd warm you up, but you're still cold. Maybe that means you did die and this is hell - it sure feels like torture. It's just the two of you in the solitary cell, and his cool hands are a torment as they touch the spots where the bed linen rubbed you raw, and his face is sorrowful.

"Miguel," he says, and your name is flatter on his tongue than you're used to, not quite the full lilt of Spanish you grew up hearing, but it's still sweet in your ears. _Michael_, El Cid calls you, and _maricon_, and sometimes he slurs the words so you can't tell which he's using, as if they were one and the same. "Miguel."

"Bless me father, for I have sinned," you say, and you laugh mirthlessly.

The marks around your neck match the marks around his neck, long since faded and never really visible to your eyes under the high white collar of his office, but you knew they were there. You put them there as you struggled and fought against your demons - the demons that plagued you and the demons in black that were coming for you as the sound of the scalpel hitting the floor rang in your head like the tinkling bells of the Communion rite. You fled to his office for protection, but then you bound his hands, and that was the first time you tried to kill yourself, even though it wasn't the first time you'd seen him bruised or bloodied.

You heard him pleading with them not to hurt you, even as they beat you down.

You heard him pleading with them not to hurt you, even as they beat you down both times.

They locked him out, the second time, but you could still hear him on the other side of the door to your cell, pleading again despite the marks you'd left on him with your fists as you struggled and fought with your demons. You found the sandwich later, squashed and oozing jelly through the bread where one of the hacks stepped on it in the fray, and you unwrapped it, ran your finger along the outside edge of the crust to capture the sugar sweetness of the grapes. When you lean in and kiss him, he tastes like that, like sugar and like smoke, and he smells like cigarettes and incense, the incense used on special feast days at the small church where you went to Mass when you were growing up.

He's still for a moment before he pushes himself backward, flustered, and rises to his feet.

"Miguel ..." he says again, and then, "What are you ...?"

He's so small, smaller than you even, and you always feel small, like you have to fill up more space with your bravado and your bluff so no one notices how little space you fill up with your body. You pump iron to fill out your muscles, but he stands straight as iron even as you come to your feet and take two steps toward him, raise one hand to rest your wrist on his shoulder and wrap your fingers loose around his neck, running them under the collar. He fills the cell, fills your space with his presence.

You can feel his pulse fluttering beneath your fingers like the wings of a bird, trapped, and you want to ask him if he's scared, but he'll only tell you the truth and then you'll have to admit your own truth in return.

_I'm scared too, hermano._

The stirring beneath your fingertips is familiar, you've felt it before, his throat under your hands, his pulse beating against your palm, and you've never known anyone that intimately -- blood, breath, heartbeat, the rhythms of their body and the sound of their sighs -- other than the girls and the women you've slept with.

He promised he wouldn't let them beat you, but they did. They beat you and they threw you in here and they starved you. He can't protect you. You know that. All he can do is bleed for you, and you've already made him bleed.

_Éste es el cáliz de mi sangre, sangre de la alianza nueva y eternata. This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant._

The words of the ritual run through your mind, and you remember the blood blooming on your knuckles as you pounded your fists against the walls, a bright burst of color in the dreary light of the cell where you're trapped, locked in and locked down, prowling your cage as the walls draw in and in, pressing so close you can feel the pressure on your heart, your lungs. They can't expand, can't fill with blood, can't fill with air, their fragile wet layers crushed like unfired clay, smashed beneath the weight of the concrete and the mortar and the thick glass panels of Oz. You can feel them press on your brain, hammer against the inside of your skull, and maybe you're hammering with your fists on the inside of your own skull, inside your own head.

_Maricon_, El Cid calls you, but _las mariposas_, you remember _Tía_ Graciela saying with a glimmer of a smile as you watched two men cross the barrio street together. _La mariposa_, and you feel like a butterfly, wings crumpled, pinned with a silver spike through your heart. You've never seen a live butterfly in the asphalt and concrete of the city, only pictures and dead specimens from a collector in a pawn shop. You remember their wings looked dry, brittle, like they'd flake away at a touch.

The _padre_ should have wings, you think, and not the fragile and frayed paper-thin wings of a butterfly. Sometimes you think you felt the brush of his wings when he leant over you as you huddled half-in and half-out of the shower stall, the touch of warm feathers against your face, alive and thrumming with blood, snowy white and shading down to gold like something on a gilt-edged prayer card.

_"Ilumíname,"_ you want to say to him. _"Dirígeme, guárdame."_

"Miguel," he says. "I can't do this."

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, he's terrified and torn.

"Shhhh ... " you tell him.

"I can't do this to you." His voice is insistent now, and he tries to step away, but you know better than anyone that there's nowhere to go in the tiny cell. "Stop it. Stop it or I'll leave."

"I beat you up and you came back," you say.

"That's different, you weren't in your right mind and I forgive you for ..."

"So, what?" you interrupt him. "You won't abandon me because of that, but you'll abandon me because of this? Loving you is worse than beating you?" And where did _that_ come from?

You're tired of being stuck in a world where it's worse to be kissed than to be beaten, and so you touch him again, fingers drifting across his lips to feel the moist warmth of his breath. It's like he's pinned by your fingers, and you lean in to kiss him some more, licking into his mouth and running your tongue along the sharp edges of his teeth. He's panting when you pull back, and you can feel his chest rise and fall against yours, can feel little puffs of his breath against your face.

"Miguel ..." He says your name, again, and his fingers are on your wrists now, tracing blue veins up your forearms, across the sensitive skin inside your elbows to your biceps, and the touch pulls a shiver from you. You can feel him hard against your thigh, and you shift, pressing into him.

He lets out a sigh as he closes his eyes under your hands, and maybe he doesn't want to look you in the eye. He's quivering, drawn tight like a cat about to bolt, and the skin of his eyelids is tender under your thumbs. You're struck by the contrast of the warm tones of your flesh - the pair of you would be copper and gold in the sun, if any sun could get into this Godforsaken place, into the dull gray hell of this prison - _los infiernos_ surely, and they told you growing up that _los infiernos_ would be hot, but hell is dark and chilly and sometimes damp, and the only light in it is the man in front of you.

You wonder what he would look like with blues and reds skating across his face from the sun pouring in through stained-glass windows like those in the uptown cathedral where _tu madre_ took you on Easter Sundays when you were growing up, before you came to Oz to visit your father. Dressed in your 4-year-old best, you looked up in wonder at the vaulted ceilings, and you clung to her hand, confused by the strange cadences and English versions of prayers that should have been familiar. You were young enough to believe in God's forgiveness, to believe that he would set someone to watch over you.

_Angel de la Guarda, dulce compañío._

But he can't guard you, has never been able to guard you, for all his talk of taking care of you. All he's been able to do is shed his blood for you, more than once. Now you just have to accept the sacrifice of his body.

_Éste es mi cuerpo, que será entregado por vosotros. This is my body, which will be given up for you._

He moans around his own fist when you fall to your knees.

He's hard and thick and slick and hot in your mouth, and your jaw aches and your talentless hands are clumsy, but from his frantic movements and the pull of his hand in your hair, you don't think he has a lot of experience to compare it to.

"Miguel," he breathes, low and sweet and desperate, just your name. "Miguel ..."

You try to flatten your tongue, the way you remember liking it, and you feel him nudge against the roof of your mouth, and the word falls apart as he makes an aching noise and arches toward you, and then you're swallowing convulsively as he shoots warm and salty. Eager as a virgin, you think, so hot for it, even though the little noises he's making are muffled.

Of course he's quiet, you realize - the last time he cried out, you were beaten.

You press your face against the rough black cloth of his pants leg and try to catch your breath, swallowing and swallowing again to clear the viscous coating from your mouth. His belly is flat and a little bit soft, and you can feel his hipbones underneath your hands as you brush your fingers across his skin before you take his hips and turn him to face the wall.

Maritza wouldn't let you do this, but you remember a girl who would, and you remember to get him good and spit-slick with your fingers and your tongue, pressing into the heat of him, pressing him wide open as he hangs poised between your body and the chill of the wall. He's still wearing his gray hooded sweatshirt, and the fabric is soft against your chest when you rise to your feet and lean against him, one arm wrapped around his waist and the other guiding yourself as he stands braced. He almost cries out as you push into him, and you try to go slow, guiding him into a slow rocking motion with the hand on his hip. You press your lips against the back of his neck when you fall into a rhythm, flicking out your tongue to trace and taste his flesh. As you pick up speed, you wrap your free hand around his where it's pressed against the wall, and he clenches your fingers in his - warm now - as he moves back against you. He turns his head, and you feel his lips press against your knuckles. His hair is silky against your face.

"Miguel ..." he says, and you feel the word in the movement of his lips against your fingers.

_Por mi culpa, por mi culpa, por mi gran culpa_, you think, and _Cristo ten piedad, Christ have mercy_, and then you're coming and the world falls apart.


End file.
